Blogging Tips for Beginners – 10 Mistakes Bloggers Make

As a blogger, offering blogging tips for beginners is paying it forward! Without those tips from other bloggers and the training I did starting out, my blog would not be where it is right now!

Blogging comes with a LOT of mistakes, especially in the first year! I have made my share of them!! I spent the first 2 months of blogging doing essentially everything wrong! I look back at some blog posts and think “who wrote this???”

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Worse than that are the mistakes I made in promoting my blog!

Blogging Tips for Beginners

I started my blog back in November of 2106 and blogged for about six months. I did everything wrong!

My writing was “ok” but I had no idea how to format posts, how to make them SEO friendly, and definitely no idea how to promote my posts so that people knew where to find me!

After taking a year off from blogging due to relocating, I decided to come back and do things right!!

I immediately began taking courses (lots of them) and re-read books I read a year ago! I listened to every blogger willing to offer blogging tips! And I can tell you, I got more pageviews in my first full month back at blogging than I did at any point in time during the first six months previously!

Offering blogging tips for beginners is more than just telling them what they should be doing or what DID work for us! It is also about sharing the mistakes bloggers make along the way so hopefully, they can avoid them!

So, in no particular order,  I am going to share with you some of the mistakes I made in promoting my blog that kept me from getting more traffic.

 

 

10 Mistakes Bloggers Make in Promoting Their Blog

Mistake #1 – Not Learning SEO 

Any and all blogging tips for beginners should include SEO!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  The short description is it basically determines if and where your site will rank in searches.  If you have poor SEO (or non-existent) your site will not be found in search results if someone is searching for a particular word or phrase.  In this post, I am not going to get into how you optimize your SEO but I suggest you find some great tutorials on it!!  Here are some of my favorites

GET YOUR BLOG ON (FREE)

GIRL BOSSES ROCK MEMBERSHIP PLAN  – This program totally changed my blog!

 

Mistake #2 – Not Learning How to Use Pinterest for Business

Pinterest is the source of the bulk of my traffic. I do get quite a bit from other social media sources and also search engines but Pinterest is by far the #1 source.

If you are not actively promoting your posts on Pinterest, you are missing out on a lot of traffic!!

Your blog is your business! Your Pinterest account should not be a personal account. If it is, you are not taking advantage of all t has to offer. I suggest a business account AND using Rich Pins.  Here is how you can create Rich Pins on Pinterest

If you are not sure how to use Pinterest to market your blog, here are some links to great courses on it

The Profitable Pinner

Pinterest for Bloggers and Business

 

  

Mistake #3 – Not Using Vertical Pins

Ok maybe you already have your account set up and you are using Pinterest but you are not getting traffic and people aren’t re-pinning your content.

One mistake I made was not using Pinterest optimized or vertical pins!

Now, I will RARELY re-pin something that is not vertical. The only way I will is if it is absolutely something I need, so I save it so that I have the link. And many times if that is the case I will save it to a private board.

If I am sharing another blogger’s content, I will not do it if it is not vertical, because most group boards have rules against it. Make your pins vertical if you want them to be shared!  Canva has some great templates to create Pinterest ready images!

 

Mistake #4 – Not Using Pinterest Group Boards

Mistake #3 mentioned group boards. Group boards are essentially a group of people sharing content about a specific niche. These boards allow members to post their own content and then typically ask they re-pin 1 or 2 pins for each pin they share. It is a great way to have others reciprocate and share your content as long as you are being considerate and sharing others’ as well.

If you are a Christian or Messianic blogger, you are welcome to visit my group board and follow the steps in the description to be added!

 

Mistake #5 – Not Providing An Easy Way For People To Share Your Content

Ok, this one is now my biggest pet peeve and one of the blogging tips for beginners I think is most valuable because all the other tips on Pinterest, etc., hinge on this one.

I want to share someone’s blog post. I read their post and I start looking for a way to share…and nothing! There are no pinnable images, there are no Facebook share buttons, there are no Click to Tweet links….nothing!

I was there myself!

You want people to share your content!

Bloggers have very little time and often read quite a few posts during their day. They don’t have the added time it takes to hunt down a way to share on each post!

Utilize the Click to Tweet plugin if you use Word Press.

It is a great way to get people to tweet portions of your post!

Use Shareaholic or Social Warfare to place social media buttons on your post. Be sure to not just use buttons for the social sites you are on, consider the ones the person sharing might be on!

Place a vertical pinnable image in your post somewhere and use a plugin like Pin It (Shareaholic has a feature to do this) so people can just hover over it and pin the image!

People WANT to help share your content!  Just don’t make it difficult for them to do!

 

 

Mistake #6 – Not Entering Pin Descriptions

Whether you use a pin in your blog post or whether you are adding pins directly in Pinterest ( I suggest pinning from your site because Pinterest prefers it), a description is so important.

Place a brief keyword rich description in there along with some hashtags and you are good to go!  Tasty Pins is a great way to do this! It will help you enter a description for Pinterest without using the Alt Text field, which is not meant to be for descriptions!

If you use Rich Pins it will give a snippet from your post but you still want to add a description as well!

In addition to pin descriptions, you should also have text on your pin telling people what it is about! If I just see a pretty picture without anything telling me what it is for, I likely won’t pin it.

I want to be able to look at the pin and see what it is about before I ever get to the pin description itself.

 

Mistake #7 – Not Sharing Others’ Content

The blogging community is a sharing community and so is Pinterest!! Pinterest loves re-pinning so be sure you are not just pinning your own content!

The more you re-pin, and the more variety you re-pin, the more engagement you will have! Don’t just re-pin within your niche either! Think of all the hobbies you have and re-pin those pins! Do you love home decor? Find pins in the styles you love and re-pin those!

But make sure you are pinning to relevant boards. Don’t just have “catch all” boards. If you pin fashion, have a fashion board. If you pin makeup ideas, have a beauty board, etc.

Also, share in other ways! Re-tweet another blogger’s tweets! Share a blog post on Facebook! If you want people to share your content and know who you are, sharing theirs is a great way to achieve that!

The blogging community is supportive so make sure you support them in return!

 

Mistake #8 – Not Utilizing Tailwind

One pin and you’re done does not work for driving traffic to your blog. You need to keep your pins cycling on Pinterest and the best way to do that is automate it.

Tailwind is the program I use to automate and schedule my pins! It keeps my older content out there so old posts don’t die a slow death online! You cannot spend your entire day manually re-pinning your older content (and newer). You want multiple pins for one blog post! So automate it to post to your group boards on a regular basis and you can set it and forget it!

If you want to learn how to do that there is some great training on it!

Tailwind also recently rolled out their Smart Loop feature, which allows you to have your content cycled through your boards consistently and without spamming!

To sign up for Tailwind and get your first 100 pins for free, click here

 

 

Mistake #9 – Not Using Tailwind Tribes

If you are already using Tailwind but are not using Tribes you are missing out on traffic. Tailwind Tribes are communities of a specific niche that function sort of like group boards and re-pin each other’s content. There are also great chat functions within a tribe where you can ask questions, etc.
A good tribe can really boost your traffic.

 

Mistake #10 – Overloading a Blog Post With Images and Pop-Ups

I am all about a blog post having images…mine do! But If I go to a post and it is nothing but images to scroll past to get to the post itself, I may not stay!

In addition, it slows your site down. 2-3 images on a post is more than enough. People will check out if they have to click more than 2 or 3 times to see something or if they have to scroll more than 2-3 seconds to see the rest of your post.

Pop-ups are another issue.  One or two pop-ups is fine! Having them on every page is going to make me leave your blog.

 

One Final Blogging Tip For Beginners

 

Read everything you can!!

One book for Christian bloggers that I highly recommend is By His Grace We Blog by Carmen Brown.

This book gives you the benefit of Carmen’s experience as a blogger and will help you avoid the many pitfalls I fell into!! I wish I had read this book earlier on in my blogging journey!!

You can read more about Carmen and her book HERE on the guest post she did for my blog!

 

Here is a link to Carmen’s book, as well as other books written by friends of mine that I recommend:

 

Some other posts you might enjoy:

HOW DO I KNOW IF GOD IS CALLING ME TO BLOG? – WHEN THE WELL RUNS DRY

THE NEW CHRISTIAN BLOGGER – FEELING LIKE A LITTLE FISH IN A BIG POND

BLOGGING FOR BEGINNERS – WHY YOUR PINS ARE NOT BEING SHARED IN TAILWIND TRIBES

CHRISTIAN BLOGGERS WANTED! – 3 BENEFITS OF STARTING CHRISTIAN LIFESTYLE BLOGS

BLOGGING FOR BEGINNERS – INCREASE BLOG TRAFFIC WITH THESE 3 SKILLS

CREATING PRODUCTS AS A BLOGGER